Pages

10.26.2017

Excerpt 1

I don't have a title yet for this new project, but it's coming along!

Here is an excerpt:

(I know, I have a comma problem. There will be editors!)

...We women are a lot closer thanks to the women who went before us, but yet we are still so very far away. Our march isn’t over. Even working in an industry that is dominated by women it’s clear we have so very far to go to be taken seriously professionally.

We need parents and teachers to teach their young boys the stories of powerful women so as they get older they respect them instead of brush them aside. It is beyond infuriating to walk into a home with fifteen years of experience in dog training, earning over 100 hours of continuing education credits and more, only to be dismissed because I’m a tiny framed woman. It’s a slap in the face when men ask me what I do professionally and be met with, “Oh, that’s cute”. I take my job, despite the humor in much of this book, quite seriously as do my students. If Aislyn ever feels that she can’t do something, it will be because someone tells her she can’t and she’ll foolishly believe those words. It’s my job to make sure she can shut it down before it infects her, and it’s all of our jobs to teach these same principles to all children.

The same principles of recognizing stress, teaching appropriate behaviors, and not being dismissive of bully behaviors I apply to Aislyn are the same methods that I use in puppy classes. Without science-based dog training, I would not be the same parent I am today, and while I am not perfect, I’m doing things much differently than my parents did. I get frustrated like they did, I send her to her room like they did with me. But I believe the science of dog training has helped me figure out a better way to guide my kid instead of have her seen and not heard. I also feel strongly that by guiding her without her fearing that she will be hit, postured at, threatened, struck, held down or any number of things parents had done in previous generations (including mine) is making her a stronger, more capable kid than I was at five.